Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [283]
Cartmen continued to be strictly supervised. The mayor issued licenses, the council set prices they could charge to haul loads, and city officials disciplined violators of ordinances. To avoid monopolization and price-gouging, the city insisted that all cartmen remain independent one-horse entrepreneurs; fleets of company-owned carts driven by wage-workers were strictly forbidden. The city did, however, organize the men into companies of forty-nine (each under supervision of a foreman), and by 1800 there were twenty such, comprising a thousand truckmen. In an effort to rein in street chaos, moreover, a 1799 state law required that carts, carriages, wagons, and sleighs keep to the left when passing other vehicles; the city adopted a like ordinance in 1800.
Like bakers and butchers, cartmen were ambivalent about municipal regulation, though in general they found paternalism in their interest. The freemanship requirement, dropped for others, continued in effect for carters, protecting them against competition from farm-based laborers, Irish immigrants, and black slaves. On the other hand, cartmen complained that by issuing so many licenses, the city created excessive competition and lowered their incomes, keeping many on the edge of subsistence.
SHAKING HANDS WITH DEATH
In 1793 an epidemic of yellow fever battered Philadelphia, and compassionate New Yorkers raised five thousand dollars for the suffering city. There was, however, no agreement on what caused the yellow fever (in fact, the agent was a virus transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito), and in a politicized era the dispute quickly took on political overtones. Federalists tended to depict it as a foreign contagion—the biological counterpart, so to speak, of French Jacobinism. Republicans answered that it was the product of “nauseous stenches” rising up every summer from the city’s “abominably filthy” waterfront and other unsanitary conditions for which only the negligence and incompetence of Federalist magistrates were to blame. Yet etiological positions were not rigid. Many merchants, generally Federalist in their politics, preferred to fault the local environment rather than imported contagions, which could lead to trade-disrupting quarantines. Indeed, virtually every city body that addressed the problem chose to sidestep the controversy by advocating both quarantine and sanitation.
In 1793 the predominately Federalist municipal government established a semiautonomous Health Committee, composed of aldermen and citizen volunteers, which cut off communications with Philadelphia, presumed source of the pestilence. Committee inspectors patrolled the waterfront with full power to turn away or quarantine persons as well as goods arriving from that city. In close conjunction with these efforts, the committee also set out to track down “Nuisances in this City,” such as the “dead horses, dogs, cats, and other dead animals lying about in such abundance, as if the inhabitants accounted the stench arising from putrid carcasses a delicious perfume,” as one letter to an editor put it sardonically.
The fever passed by in 1793, and the following year Governor George Clinton officially reinsitituted the Health Committee. The group in turn got the Common Council to lease Bellevue, a rustic estate owned by Quaker merchant Lindley Murray that overlooked the East River north of the settled city, for the use of fever victims.
In 1795 yellow fever was reported to be widespread in the West Indies. Early summer, while hot and humid, passed uneventfully, though Dr. Valentine Seaman noticed (without understanding the significance of his observation) that “musquetoes were never before known, by the oldest inhabitants, to have been so numerous as at this season, especially